In Swartz protest, Anon hacks U.S. site, threatens leaks

This is what the United States Sentencing Commission's hacked home page looked like.

In response to the death of tech activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist
collective Anonymous hacked a U.S. government Web site related to the
justice system and posted a screed saying it would begin leaking a cache
of government documents if the justice system is not reformed.

The group hacked the Web site for the United States Sentencing Commission
late Friday, posting a message about what it's calling "Operation Last
Resort," along with a set of downloadable encrypted files it said
contain sensitive information. The sentencing commission is the
caretaker of the guidelines for sentencing in U.S. federal courts.

"Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed," the group's statement reads.
"Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced
an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game
he could not win -- a twisted and distorted perversion of justice -- a
game where the only winning move was not to play."

The recent suicide of Swartz, a proponent of freely accessible information, has been blamed by some on what they say were outrageously aggressive efforts
on the part of the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts to punish Swartz for
his alleged theft of millions of articles from a database of academic
journals. The 26-year-old Swartz, who struggled with bouts of
depression, had been charged with 13 felonies and threatened with
decades in prison and fines exceeding $1 million. U.S. Attorney Carmin Ortiz says Swartz's lawyers were also offered a plea bargain in which he'd plead guilty and serve perhaps six months.

Anonymous encouraged its followers to download the files on the
hacked site, a set of nine downloads named after the U.S. Supreme
Court's nine justices and collectively referred to by the hacking
collective as a "warhead."

"Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.AEE256 is primed and armed. It has been
quietly distributed to numerous mirrors over the last few days and is
available for download from this website now. We encourage all Anonymous
to syndicate this file as widely as possible."

The group wouldn't specify what, exactly, is in the files, saying
only that "the contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by
revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some
things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing
today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily
redacted partial contents of the file."

The contents of the encrypted files can apparently be accessed only
with a decryption key, and Anonymous said it didn't necessarily want to
provide that key to its followers -- it mentioned "collateral damage" as
a result of any leaks and said: "It is our hope that this warhead need
never be detonated." But the group said the U.S. government must begin
acting on reforms to the justice system suggested by the system's
critics, and in spelling out its demands more specifically, it mentioned
plea bargaining and suggested the overhaul of legislation such as the
mid-1980s antihacking law titled the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.